Orhan Doğan


Orhan Doğan was a Kurdish politician of the Democratic Society Party.

Education and professional career

In 1974 he went to the University of Ankara to study law and began working as an accountant at the Ankara Altındağ Primary Education Directorate. After graduating he took up an internship with Ismail Mungan. father of Murathan Mungan. Later he settled to Cizre where he worked as a lawyer and during his term as the head of the Turkish Human Rights Association in the Sirnak province he was a defender of Kurdish rights.

Political career

He contributed to the Kurdish Report of the Social Democrat Populist Party and later resigned from the party in 1989 in protest against the dismissal of seven Kurdish deputies for attending a Kurdish Identity and Human Rights Conference in Paris.
In 1991 he was elected to the Turkish Parliament, later joining the Democracy Party. Doğan was arrested on the 17 March 1994 and on the 8 December 1994 he was convicted, together with other DEP deputies Leyla Zana, Hatip Dicle and Selim Sadak, of membership in an organization and sentenced to 15 years in prison. An early day motion in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom in 2001 mentions him as an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience. On the 17 July 2001, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg said the trial against Doğan was unfair. On the 22 April 2004 the European Parliament issued a resolution hoping that the court of appeals quashes the sentence given to Doğan and others and that an amnesty will be declared to all imprisoned because of their political views.
Upon his release in 2004 he helped to found the Democratic Society Party.

Death

He died in 2007 following a heart attack he suffered, while giving a speech at a festival in Doğubeyazıt.